Note to students: For the quiz, be able to compare the maternal nudes of Kollwitz and Modersohn-Becker
discussed in this article. Know Betterton’s thesis and be able to give some of the specific evidence she uses
to substantiate it. I have deleted sections of this article that elaborate on the psychoanalytic feminist theory
of thinkers like Julia Kristeva because many of you will be unfamiliar with it. If you want to read more,
refer to the original essay as well as Betterton’s bibliography, which I scanned for you here along with her
endnotes. They will guide you to further reading and (in quality and format) serve as an example for own
your research paper.
From: Griselda Pollock, ed., Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings (London
& New York: Routledge, 1996) pp.159-179.
Maternal figures: the maternal nude in the work of Käthe
Kollwitz and Paula Modersohn Becker
Rosemary Betterton
Paula Modersohn-Becker's Reclining other and Child, 1906, and Kathe Kollwitz' Woman with Dead Child,
1903 (figs. 1 & 2), are striking in their representation of motherhood. They depict the maternal state as one
of physical absorption and psychic
possession in a way which disturbs
our preconceptions. Nearly a
century after they were produced,
the images still have the power to
disconcert us by the directness of
their vision. Both images stand
outside the western cultural
tradition of spiritual and
dematerialized motherhood
symbolized by the immaculate conPaula Modersohn-Becker, Reclining Mother and Child, 1906, oil on
canvas, 124.7 cm W., Bremen
ception and virgin birth.2
The two female figures remind us,
in the solidity of their flesh and the strength of their enfolding arms, that it is through the body of the mother
that the unique and irreplaceable intensity of birth is experienced. And yet the two images are very
different: while Modersohn-Becker represents the blissful intimacy of the maternal relationship, Kollwitz
shows us the unspeakable pain of maternal loss.
Unusually, both artists have chosen to combine two separate genres of visual representation, the
figure of the mother and the figure of the nude. In so doing, Modersohn-Becker and Kollwitz have brought
together two poles of femininity which are traditionally
held apart, the representation of the female body as
erotic and sexually available and as reproductive and
private.3
In this chapter I want to explore the links
between these two works and their location within
contemporary discursive constructions of motherhood.
I will suggest that the previously unremarked
configuration of the 'maternal nude' in their work is a
central metaphor through which Kollwitz and
Modersohn-Becker were able to explore the
Käthe Kollwitz, Woman with Dead Child, 1903,
contradictions for women between maternal and artistic etching with engraving overprinted with a gold
tone plate, 47.6 cm. w., London
identity.
Three types of material are used to frame the arguments here: biographical sources, drawing
primarily on the artists' own published letters and journals; debates about the role of women and the status
of motherhood in Germany before 1914; and psychoanalytic accounts of the formation of maternal
subjectivity. The extent to which these materials can offer critical insights into reading the images
themselves is one of the questions which this chapter seeks to address.
Representations of motherhood
The two artists, Käthe Kollwitz (b. 1867) and Paula Modersohn-Becker (b. 1876) had much in common.
They were born within a decade of each other in the northern German cities of Konigsberg and Dresden
respectively, in the former state of Prussia. Both were brought up within liberal bourgeois families and
received their training at women's art schools in Berlin and Munich, each achieving some measure of
professional independence by the turn of the century. They moved in similar progressive circles, for
example, both knew the brothers Hauptmann - Gerhart, whose radical play The Weavers was the basis for
Kollwitz' first graphic cycle, and Carl, playwright and novelist, in whose house Paula Modersohn-Becker
spent her honeymoon in 1901. There is, however, no evidence that they ever met or knew of each other's
work.4 In spite of these similarities, in feminist literature they have been more often described in terms of
their differences from each other.5 In this comparison, Modersohn-Becker is seen to embody the
individualist figure of the avant-garde artist, while Kollwitz represents the very model of proletarian,
feminist activism. This is nowhere more evident than in discussion of their representations of motherhood.
This view was stated most succinctly by Linda Nochlin in her original analysis of the iconography
of motherhood in the two artists' work. Arguing that Modersohn-Becker's images of motherhood derive
from a nineteenth-century pictorial tradition in which the peasant mother becomes the ‘very embodiment of
fatalistic conservatism', Nochlin compared these with the political activism of Kollwitz' revolutionary
heroine, Black Anna, in The Peasant's Revolt of 1902-8 (Sutherland Harris and Nochlin 1976: 67). Nochlin
thus interpreted Kollwitz' representations of motherhood, in contrast to those of Modersohn-Becker, as
social documents connected to specific feminist and socialist perspectives.
It has therefore been her public persona as an artist of strong political sympathies which has, until
recently, been the primary focus of Kollwitz' interest for feminist critics. Through the lens of social
criticism, her depictions of women as heroic mothers and resisting workers have received most serious
critical attention. This construction of Kollwitz as first and foremost a political artist places emphasis on a
crucial aspect of her work and beliefs, but at the expense of exploring some of the contradictions and
ambivalences towards art and politics revealed in her journal and letters. In a recent reappraisal of Kollwitz'
work, Elizabeth Prelinger has argued that a more considered approach to Kollwitz' artistic and political
beliefs is needed, and has suggested that she lacked a 'clearly defined approach to political matters'
(Prelinger 1992: 78). Prelinger also pays welcome attention to the study of the female nude in Kollwitz'
work, an area hitherto neglected in feminist criticism. The nude makes up asignificant proportion of
Kollwitz' figure studies before 1920, particularly during the period when she was employed as a teacher at
the Berlin School for Women Artists. And, although the nude does not constitute a central subject in
Kollwitz' later work, when it appears it is frequently linked to the figure of the mother. Rather than
representing a political ideology which can be simply read off the image, Kollwitz' 'maternal nudes', like
much else of her work, suggest a complex and contradictory process of negotiation between the different
meanings attached to motherhood.
The image of the mother, often breastfeeding her child, appears throughout Paula
Modersohn-Becker's mature work, from her entry into the artistic colony of Worpswede in 1897 until her
premature death, three weeks after the birth of her own daughter, in 1907. While her early studies of peasant
mothers were influenced initially by the genre style of Fritz Mackensen, her teacher at Worpswede, she
developed an independent approach culminating in the large naked mother figures of her late works. In her
monograph on Modersohn-Becker, Gillian Perry suggested that 'These anonymous monumental mothers
are themselves symbols of a mysterious life-giving process. In their detachment they seem to reflect some
of Paula's own ambiguous attitude to motherhood' (Perry 1979: 59).
Modersohn-Becker's images have often been interpreted with reference to contemporary ideologies
of primitivism.6 In a number of self portraits, for example, her Self Portrait with an Amber Necklace, 1906,
Modersohn-Becker did indeed represent her sexual identity in metaphors of nature, making visual
connections between her own body and flowers and foliage, the symbols of fertility which surround her.
While such paintings may reinforce a traditional encoding of the female body with nature,
Modersohn-Becker was employing one of the few sets of terms available to a woman of her class at a time
when the representation of female sexuality was problematic for a bourgeois woman artist. What we may
see in her work is less an instinctive response to nature than a strategy with which to address the absence of
a visual language of the body available to women artists in the 1900s.
But the contrast that is drawn between the two artists in terms of their respective iconography of
motherhood also does not address adequately the complex political coding of maternal discourses in
Germany at the turn of the century. Moreover, it disguises the real conflict which both artists fac;: in
addressing the representation of motherhood within the context of prevailing cultural attitudes femininity
and to art. For Modersohn-Becker, as indeed for Kollwitz, ambivalence in the repres: tation of motherhood
could not simply be a personal matter. It was the product of a profound cultu _ rupture between the role of
the artist and the role of the mother. This conflict can be seen to opc-ate through a number of parallel and
related dualities in both artists' work: between the self portr; and the nude; the nude and the mother; and
between visual representation and maternal origin.
THE BODY OF THE ARTIST AND THE BODY OF THE NUDE
By taking account of a specific set of configurations around gender, artistic identity and motherhood in Germany at the turn of the century it is possible to open up different readings of the maternal body
in the work of Kollwitz and Modersohn-Becker. Both artists produced
images which were informed by contemporary debates about women and
sexuality in German political and cultural circles. By the 1900s, the 'good'
mother had become the focus of widespread concern about women's
function in the family and in the perpetuation of the race. For an artist who
was also woman to paint the nude and, moreover, the nude body of the
mother, was to confront directly the contemporary inscription of gendered
difference on the body.
Study of the nude was of crucial interest to women artists in the
early modernist period because it was the point of intersection for
contemporary discourses on gender and art. Mastery of the female nude
Lovis Corinth, Self Portrait
with Model, 1903
was central to the construction of artistic identity in the nineteenth century
and the site of a specifically gendered relationship between the male artist and female model. Its elements
had come to represent a fundamental metaphor for creativity in modern European art: the artist as master of
the gaze and of the natural world, signified through the naked body of a woman.
By the 1900s, the relationship between the male painter and the female model was firmly
entrenched as a central image by which to define artistic identity in both popular myth and painterly
imagination. In a work by the German painter, Lovis Corinth, Self Portrait with Model, the artist placed
himself high in the canvas, facing squarely out of the frame, his gaze and his body commanding the
pictorial space. He looks over the head of the model, whose back is turned towards us, her face hidden
against his shoulder and one hand laid on his breast. His arms frame her body but, rather than returning her
embrace, he holds a brush in his left hand, a palette and brushes erect in his right. Corinth's bravura
signature and the date and place of execution, 1903 Berlin, appear to either side of the artist's head, as
though confirming his ownership of the image and its occupants.
The model here is his wife, Charlotte Berend. In painting himself with his wife, Corinth referred to
a type of artist's self portrait established by Rubens in the seventeenth century. But the painting also recalls
more recent precedents in nineteenth-century images of the ideal bourgeois couple, where the wife is shown
as support and helpmeet to her husband, the man looking outwards to the world, the woman turning to him
for her protection.8 Corinth thus proclaimed his own status as a successful artist in command of the
language and traditions of art. In so doing, he legitimated his position culturally through accepted norms,
constructing an image which conflated two kinds of gender relationship, that of male artist and female nude,
and of husband and wife. The portrait can thus be seen to authorize an expected, and gendered, reading. At
one and the same time, Self Portrait with Model affirms the prescribed relationship between husband and
wife, and effaces Charlotte Berend's professional
identity as an artist practicing in her own right.9
In the face of such phallic mastery, how was it
possible for a woman artist to assert her own identity
and to engage with such a deeply gendered terrain as
the nude?10 Those images which combine self
portraiture with the nude articulate the problem in
representing this psychic split between feminine and
artistic subjectivity. A self-portrait, like the act of
Käthe Kollwitz, Self Portrait and Nude Studies,
1900, graphite, pen and black ink. 280 x 445 cm.
Stuttgart
writing a journal or a letter, constructs the self as other,
making available to others a particular representation
of the subject which the author has selected. The autobiographical is thus not an unmediated expression of
inner being, but the production of a fictive self which functions as a form of self re-presentation'. For a male
artist like Lovis Corinth, this process could legitimate an existing and accepted public identity, but for a
woman it was far more problematic, involving a conflict between the 'public' and 'private' self.11 It is in this
light that we may understand the significance of the repeated self portraits which Modersohn-Becker and
Kollwitz produced throughout their lives in terms of a need to produce the self both as artist and as woman.
In an early work by Käthe Kollwitz, Self Portrait and Nude Studies, 1900, the juxtaposition of the
artist's head and the nude body is striking. This preparatory study was one of a series for an etching, Life, in
which Kollwitz superimposed her portrait head on a group of standing nudes which appeared on the
left-hand side of a symbolic triptych. In this drawing, the artist's vertical profile is marked off from the
reclining nude torso by an area of intense shaded black which throws the face into harshly lit relief. In
contrast, the female body is drawn frontally, the strongest accent of shadow, marked by a brown
brushstroke, directing attention between the legs, a focus which appears to correspond to the artist's line of
sight. The fragmenting and severing of the female sexual body in a way which both emphasizes the genitals
and their exposure to the viewer, is more familiar today in relation to the pornographic gaze. It is with a
sense of shock that we see it here. The image seems to suggest something of the sexual objectification
implicit in the artist's control- ling look but, by placing her own profile head in place of where the missing
head of the nude would be, Kollwitz reveals that she too is the object of the gaze, she is looked at as well as
looking.
At the time when Modersohn-Becker, Kollwitz and Corinth were producing their self portraits in
the 1900s, questions of gender and creativity and women's dual role as biological and as intellectual
producers were being fiercely debated in Germany. The identities of 'woman' and 'artist' were considered by
many to be mutually exclusive. These issues had become a matter of public debate as a result of the
emergent feminist movement in Germany in the last decade of the nineteenth century, a debate which
centred on motherhood as a primary concern. Given the conservative bias of the official art world in Berlin,
it is not surprising to find the art historian, Karl Scheffler, arguing in Die Frau und die Kuinst, 1908, that
women lacked the will and the talent to become creative artists, being better suited by nature to the
performing arts.12 But anti-feminists and feminists alike showed a surprising consensus in their attitudes
towards women as creative artists. For example, the Swedish writer Ellen Key, whose ideas on motherhood
became influential on the German women's movement in the 1890s, also believed that women's talent was
for 'receptive' rather than 'creative' genius and that, lacking true originality, they were more suited to acting
and singing. Even a radical feminist like Lily Braun could argue in Die Frauenfrage, 1901, that women
were more capable in interpretative roles than in the creative arts.13
Such views simultaneously reinforced woman's traditionally exhibitionist role and prohibited her
from entry into the sphere of cultural production on equal terms with men. Margaret Whitford has
suggested that 'In the traditional repartition of roles, women represent the body for men. The resulting split
between intelligible and sensible then becomes difficult to shift, because it appears to be the basis of all
thought' (Whitford 1991: 62).
The normative pairing of male artist and female model reproduces that fundamental gendered
division between the 'intelligible and sensible', mind and body, in western thought. In this division of roles,
the artist may look at, but not inhabit, the body of the woman. And, as Jane Gallop has argued, 'if we think
physically rather than metaphysically, of the mind-body split through the body, it becomes an image of
shocking violence' (Gallop 1988: I).14
Kollwitz' image suggests something of the violence that this split subjectivity might engender for
the woman artist. Her inability to resolve the separation between the self portrait head and the nude body
reveals the division between the artist who has the right to look and the female body as object of the gaze. In
this violent splitting of head from body, she places herself at one and the same time in the masculine and
feminine position, at once subject and object, a division which it was impossible to resolve within the terms
of contemporary discussion of women and art.15
In feminist writing on science, the concept of detachment or objectivity has been connected to a
specifically masculine subjectivity, to the desire for a separation between an observer and the thing known,
the subject and object of knowledge. This has been linked further to the denial of maternal origin and the
fantasy of self-generation, of being father or mother to oneself.16 The fantasy of a self freed from connection
to the mother is necessary, according to psychoanalytic accounts, for socialization into the symbolic order
and the correct assumption of sexual difference. This psychic splitting between subject and object may
suggest another level on which the dislocating effect of Kollwitz' Self Portrait and Nude Studies can be
explained. Unlike the male artist, Kollwitz cannot simply occupy the position of detached observer, since to
do so would be to negate her own body. Through the act of representing the female body as object, the male
artist is able to re-enact an Oedipal separation of the child from its mother. But for a woman artist to paint
the female body is to confront questions of likeness as well as difference, of proximity to, as well as
distance from the maternal body. The body of the artist and the body of the nude: what is at stake here is the
separation of the two. If the body of the artist was permitted to women, it was only in so far as their own
bodies, and specifically their bodies as mothers were denied.
THE BODY OF THE MOTHER
Combining commitment to their work as serious professionals with responsibilities for children
was a source of tension and anxiety for many women artists of the period. A reading of
Modersohn-Becker's and Kollwitz' letters and journals reveals a continual process of negotiation between
their professional commitment to work and personal expectations of marriage and motherhood. The
struggle to define their artistic identities against the claims of family, friends and social convention was
hard won. Kathe Kollwitz' sister students at the Munich School of Women's Art in the 1880s had believed
that marriage and an artistic career were incompatible, demanding celibacy as the ideal state for a woman
artist. She herself later recorded the tensions between motherhood and work in her diaries, emotionally
committed to her two sons but resentful of the time taken up when she was unable to work.
For Paula Becker, marriage to Otto Modersohn in 1901 had offered the opportunity of continuing to
work in the relative freedom of the artistic colony of Worpswede, the support and encouragement of an
older, more established artist, and a degree of economic security and independence from her own family.
But she began to feel constricted by the narrow artistic outlook of Worpswede and the expectations of a
shared married life, which included taking on responsibility for Modersohn's daughter from a previous
marriage. She sought escape in Paris, where she worked during 1903 and 1905, finally returning to Paris in
1906 after breaking with Otto Modersohn.
The years 1901/2 had marked a turning point in her work and, in a number of letters and journal
entries written at the end of 1901 and in the following year, she linked her experiences of her marriage with
statements on the development of her work. Significantly, she used imagery of birth and fertility to describe
the progress of her painting: 'There have been three young wives in Worpswede for some time now. And the
babies are due around Christmas. I'm still not ready. I must wait awhile so that I will bear magnificent fruit'
(22. 10. 1901) and:
There are times when this feeling of devotion and dependence lies dormant.... Then all at once this
feeling awakes and surges and roars, as if the container would nearly burst. There's no room for
anything else. My Mother. Dawn is within me and I feel the approaching day. I am becoming
something. (6. 7. 1902)
(Modersohn-Becker 1980: 201-11)
Becker's growing self-confidence in her abilities as a painter
recurs as a theme in her letters and journal entries of these years. But
the intellectual atmosphere in which she was working in the 1900s
made it especially difficult to resolve the conflict between her
identity as a woman and as an artist. The reiteration of her desire and
will to paint must be read against the failure to recognize her
independent status as a painter on the part of her fellow artists at
Worpswede and of her family.17 She appeared to need to represent
herself as an artist, both to herself and to others, in her private
writings and in a series of self portraits from these years.
In letters written home and diary entries during her fourth
Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self
Portrait on Her Sixth Wedding Day,
1906, oil on board, 101.5cm H,
Bremen
and final visit to Paris in 1906, Modersohn-Becker makes a number
of references to her own sexuality and potential pregnancy. Her
comments suggest an ambivalence in which the attraction of and
desire for motherhood is mixed with an increasing sense of the failure of her own marriage. Having left Otto
Modersohn behind in Worpswede, she felt herself to be standing between her old life and new identity as an
independent artist. In a letter to her mother dated 8 May 1906 she wrote: ' Now I am beginning a new life.
Don't interfere, just let me be. It's so very beautiful. This last week I've been living as if in ecstasy. I feel I've
accomplished something good' (Modersohn-Becker 1980: 286).
It was in May 1906 that she painted Self Portrait on Her Sixth Wedding Day, in which she depicted
herself pregnant, naked from the hips up, her arms gently encircling her swollen belly. Unusually, Becker
signed and inscribed the canvas: 'I painted this at the age of thirty on my sixth wedding day. PB.', the date
marking the fifth anniversary of her marriage on 25 May 1901. She thus deliberately chose to represent
herself as pregnant at the precise moment in her life when she had decisively rejected the identity of wife
and mother. This Self Portrait is often referred to as anticipating her actual pregnancy by some mysterious
and intuitive process, an interpretation which confirms the prevalent critical view of Modersohn-Becker as
a 'primitive' artist. Her premature death as a consequence of childbirth in the following year after she had
returned, under pressure, to her marriage, has overdetermined this view of her work.18
A different reading at Self Portrait on Her Sixth Wedding Day would suggest that, here at least,
Becker is not representing motherhood as a natural state but as a metaphor, not least in the unusual
combination of pregnancy with a nude self portrait. Becker confronts her own image as pregnant Other –
that which she both desires and has refused — in order to maintain her separate identity as 'artist'.
According to Lacan’s account of the acquisition of sexed identity, the mirror image reflects the self as
coherent, but this image of coherence is a fantasy, a necessary construct through which the human subject is
able to enter into possession of language and make sense of the social world. In Becker's Self Portrait, the
image of motherhood is just such a fantasy, a temporary moment of coherence, and this may explain how
the painting can hold together disparate elements with such apparent ease. It is at one and the same time an
individual portrait and an emblematic pregnant body, a private reference to her marriage and the public
statement of a nude. These subjective contradictions are suggested in the formal contrast between the strong
modelling of her head and right hand and the paler tonalities of the body and the left arm which cradles her
belly. These latter are painted so that the form of the body merges into the grey patterned wall behind,
suggesting an insubstantiality of the flesh itself.
In her essay, “Sabat Mater,” Julia Kristeva explores the implications of the cult of the Virgin Mary
for the construction of femininity and motherhood. Within a psychoanalytic framework deriving from
Lacan, Kristeva addresses the question of maternal subjectivity, examining the relationship between the
patriarchal ideal and the lived, non-symbolic aspects of giving birth. She defines the maternal as:
the ambivalent principle that is bound to the species on the one hand, and on the other stems from an
identity catastrophe that causes the Name to topple over into the unnameable that one imagines as
femininity, non-language or body.
(Kristeva 1986: 163)
Kristeva's definition of the maternal as 'bound to the species' recalls debates in Germany at the turn
of the century in which the concept of motherhood was closely linked to eugenics. That it also represents a
crisis of identity, in which the 'unnameable' feminine body is made present, suggests something of the
conflicts underlying the repeated image of the body of the naked mother in Paula Modersohn-Becker's work.
For, according to Kristeva's analysis of the maternal, it entails a separation and loss of self:
So, to imagine a mother as the subject of gestation ... is simultaneously to admit the risk of a loss of
identity and to disavow it. It is to acknowledge that we are shaken by biology, by the unsymbolized
drives and that this escapes social exchange, escapes representation of the given object, escapes
the contract of desire. 20
(Kristeva 1981: 158-9)
By imagining herself as pregnant, Becker is able to give a symbolic form to the maternal state of
lost identity and, simultaneously, to 'disavow' it. It is significant that she chose the visual prototype of the
sacred womb, the Madonna del Parto, in which the Virgin Mary is represented in pregnancy.21 For in such
images, the Madonna's body becomes symbol of the Virginal maternal', the impossible duality of inviolable
and fertile body which is at the heart of the Christian ideal of womanhood. In representations of the Virgin
Mother, the female body appears as a sealed vessel. As Lynda Nead has argued, one of the principal
functions of the female nude in western art has also been the containment and regulation of the female
sexual body:
The forms, conventions, and poses of art have worked metaphorically to shore up the female body –
to seal orifices and to prevent marginal matter from transgressing the boundary dividing the inside
of the body and the outside, the self from the space of the other.
(Nead 1992: 6)
But if, as Nead suggests, the function of the nude is to make 'safe' the permeable borderline between
nature and culture, the maternal body potentially disrupts that boundary. For the maternal body points to the
impossibility of closure, to a liminal state where the boundaries of the body are fluid. In the act of giving
birth, as well as during pregnancy and breastfeeding, the body of the mother is the subject of a constant
exchange with that of the child. Whereas the nude is seamless, the pregnant body signifies the state in which
the boundaries of inside and outside, self and other, dissolve. In Kristeva's words, the maternal body is 'a
thoroughfare, a threshold where "nature" confronts "culture"' (Kristeva 1980: 238).
In this respect, the figuration of the maternal nude is a contradiction in terms, a profound rupture in
representation. But, as Kristeva argues, in the Christian image of the Madonna, the potential threat of the
maternal body is contained within the imaginary construct of the virgin birth, the body inviolate. Such an
inaccessible ideal of femininity cannot be achieved except by the sacrifice of sexuality or by, 'if she is
married, one who leads a life that would remove from the 'earthly' condition and dedicate her to the highest
sublimation alien to her body. A bonus, however: the promised jouissance (Kristeva 1986: 182).
Paula Becker had removed herself from the 'earthly' condition of her marriage, to which she
referred in the inscription on the self portrait. The jouissance which she chose at this moment over
biological motherhood was the 'ecstasy' of creativity to which she referred in her letter of 8 May. Her desire
for a child could be sublimated through symbolic representation. The 'immaculate conception' of the Self
Portrait was achieved in the production of the maternal body as representation, without the loss of identity
which Kristeva argues is entailed in actual motherhood. The redoubling of the image of containment
signified in the figuration of the nude and the virgin mother is also suggested by the self-possession of the
figure herself. The inviolability of the pregnant body, protected gently by her enfolding arms, is held at a
distance from the spectator by the artist’s direct yet inscrutable gaze. It indicates a condition of temporary
suspension between subject and object, between the virginal and maternal, and between the identity of artist
as the maker of images and mother as the maker of flesh. (…)
TWO MATERNAL NUDES
In Reclining Mother and Child, 1906, Modersohn-Becker paints the mother and child as though they exist
outside social discourse. The setting is minimal, a white sheet and pillow against a midnight blue ground,
and the woman's body is removed from any context which might define her individual history. Unlike
Modersohn-Becker's many paintings of peasant mothers, this is not a secular Madonna surrounded by
symbolic flowers and fruits, but a figure whose only identity is literally embodied. In a number of
preliminary studies for the painting, the artist explored various relationships between the mother and still
unsexed child which differ in the ways in which the figures are shown, being either separated or linked by
their different poses. In one drawing the child sits upright against its mothers thighs while she lies slumped,
seemingly exhausted and unaware, her breasts and arms slack. In another study, which prefigures the final
painting, the body of the mother and child mirror one another in complete physical unity; the child's head is
pressed against the mother's face. Like the moment after birth when a newly born baby is placed on the
mother's belly, the image signifies a connection between internal and external space. It is as though the
child, lying embraced in a fetal position, were still a part of the mother's own body.
In psychoanalytic terms, this is the state of primary narcissism when the infant does not yet perceive itself to be separated from the mother. Modersohn-Becker returns constantly in her representations of
motherhood to this pre-Oedipal moment when mother and child are shown as one, either in the act of
breastfeeding or, as here, in the intimate reciprocity of their two bodies. This intense physical relationship
of the mother and child provides one means of access to the experience of the maternal body. As viewers,
we are returned to the possibility of primal pleasure, to the buried memory of the maternal object. In
representing the state before separation from the mother, before awareness of sexual difference occurs.
Modersohn-Becker here 'escapes' the spectacle of the erotic. Pleasure in the power of sight — the
voyeurism implicit in the nude — is replaced by the pleasures of touch.32 The physicality of the maternal
experience and its psychic grounding in the body is suggested by the pervading sensation of weight in the
painting; the paint itself is dense and flat, and a dark line anchors the body to the ground. The painting offers
us a representation of maternal origin rooted in the physical sensations of the intimacy and connectness of
the infant-mother relationship. (…)
In Reclining Mother and Child, Modersohn-Becker describes a subjective space in which self and
other are inextricably linked. One way in which we can see this is in the unusual spatial construction evident
in the painting as well as in some of the preliminary studies. The viewpoint is high: we look down upon the
mother's body from above and yet, at the same time, it appears to tilt towards us in the upper part of the
picture plane, curving around the foreground space. As viewers, we are thus placed both at a distance from
and enfolded into the maternal body. The binary division between artist and mother in Kristeva's account,
between the exterior and interior of the mother's body, is suspended. In its place, the 'maternal nude'
simultaneously affirms artistic identity and opens up the possibility of representing the mother's body from
her own point of view, in terms of likeness as well as of difference, of proximity as well as of separation.
And yet, within Modersohn-Becker's painting, such maternal subjectivity can only exist in a space which is
stripped of all social or symbolic reference. It is as though the dissolution of binary opposites can be
represented only as taking place in a Utopian space
outside the realm of the social.
I want to suggest that the same problem in
representing the maternal subject is also present in
Kathe Kollwitz' images of motherhood. Like
Modersohn-Becker, Kollwitz deals with the
mother-child relationship, but if the former represents
a pre-Oedipal state of unity, then Kollwitz is
preoccupied with maternal loss. As most critics have
noted, the death of a child is a repeated theme in
Kollwitz' many images of mothers and children
throughout her long career. Her choice of subject has
frequently been linked both to the death of her younger
Käthe Kollwitz, Death and Woman, 1910, etching and
sandpaper aquatint, 44.7 cm H, Private Collection
son, Peter, who was killed in 1914 at the outset of the First World War, and to the experiences of the
working-class women whom Kollwitz knew from her husband Karl's surgery, for whom the death of a child
was a frequent occurrence. But while this biographical context is undoubtedly important, it cannot explain
the frequent repetition of images of the death of children which occur even in her earliest work, for example
in Poverty (1893—4), from the graphic cycle A Weavers' Rebellion. The psychoanalyst Alice Miller has
located this obsession with a child's death in the repressed experiences of Kollwitz' own mother, who lost
her first two babies in infancy.34 In a fascinating reading of Kollwitz' childhood memories drawn from her
Journal, Miller argues that it is the shadow of her dead siblings and her own mother's loss which haunts
Kollwitz' work. In this analysis, Kollwitz' images take on a psychotherapeutic function, but in Miller's
interpretation they are still located within an essentially biographical framework and, moreover, one which
does not acknowledge the complex articulation of the relations of mother and artist in Kollwitz' own adult
life.
This fundamental preoccupation with maternal loss can be seen at its most powerful in Woman with
Dead Child of 1903 where the naked body of the mother grips and enfolds the body of her dead son.
Kollwitz used herself and her 7-year-old son, Peter, as models for the etching, although there is nothing
specific in the image to suggest a self portrait.35 In a similar treatment of the theme, Pieta 1903, for which
she made numerous studies, Kollwitz drew directly on the Christian icon of the Virgin Mary mourning her
dead son in her lap, and in this image the mother's face laid on the body of the child expresses an entirely
human experience of grief and tenderness.36 In the final version of Woman with Dead Child the glowing
gold ground recalls its medieval and Renaissance prototypes, but the mother is rendered anonymous by the
pain which convulses her. Her massive size and strength suggest a non-human quality and, as in
Modersohn-Becker's Reclining Mother and Child, the figure exists outside any specific social space. In
contrast to that blissful unity of mother and child, Kollwitz' mother bespeaks a terrible loss: the splitting of
the maternal body. In Woman with Dead Child, we see the violence of separation of the child from the
mother in the process of gaining independent identity. In a reversal of the passage of birth, the mother
absorbs the child into her own body; she possesses and is possessed by it. The intensity with which the
mother's face is pressed to her son's throat and chest suggests she is trying to ingest his body, to
reincorporate it back into her own, as well as to breathe life into it. Kollwitz' friend Beate Bonus Jeep
described her initial reaction to the image in perceptive terms:
A mother, animal-like, naked, the light coloured corpse of her dead child between her thigh bones
and arms, seeks with her eyes, with her lips, with her breath, to swallow back into herself the
disappearing life that once belonged to her womb.
(quoted in Prelinger 1992: 42)
(…)
The duality of representation, which implies both the loss and the threat of the mother, is repeated
in a later series of images which reinforce the connection Kollwitz made between creativity, female
generation and death. In an unusually explicit image, Liebeszene (Love Scene), belonging to the series of
Sekreta drawings made around 1910 during the period of her love affair with the Viennese publisher Hugo
Heller, Kollwitz represents the act of sexual intercourse in an extraordinarily direct way. These drawings
were never exhibited, and such a powerfully erotic image, with the suggestion of women's sexual passion,
would have been unimaginable as a public statement by a woman artist, although there are some parallels in
women's private writings of the period.39 This drawing can be closely related to a series of symbolic
etchings on the theme of death, woman and a child, also dating from 1910. In one etching, Death and
Woman, the same pose for the woman in Liebeszene I is used in reverse. Here, however, it is not a lover but
Death which embraces her, while her child clings passionately to her body. The representation of the sexual
act and death, like the birth and death of a child, have become mirror images for each other. Each represents
a moment of engulfment and obliteration of individual identity, a passage of transition in which the fear of
the loss of self is made present. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that the image of a child's death stood in
this context for Kollwitz' continuing fear of loss of her own creative identity, in a transference in which she
equated the maternal state with artistic productivity. In her Journal, Kollwitz recorded frequent period of
creative block when she could hardly work for months at a time. In an entry dated April 1910, following a
repeated dream in which she again had a small baby, she wrote:
No longer diverted by other emotions, I work the way a cow grazes, but Heller once said that such
calm is death. Perhaps in reality I accomplish little more. The hands work and work and the head
imagines it is producing God knows what. Yet formerly in my so wretchedly limited working time, I
was more productive because I was more sensual: I lived as a human being must live, passionately
interested in everything.
(Kollwitz 1955: 53)
Maternal subjectivity is represented here as the condition of artistic production rather than, as contemporary
discourses insisted, its very antithesis.
Both Kollwitz and Modersohn-Becker can be seen to exemplify the difficult project of 'theorising and
enacting (maternal) subjectivity and of finding adequate forms of representation for it' (to paraphrase
Braidotti 1991: 137). But the problem for the woman artist still remained: how to represent the mother as
subject within a culture which provided no language or discursive framework for her creative expression.
The nude lay at the point of intersection between discourses of femininity and sexuality on the one hand,
and the construction of artistic identity on the other. While the nude was readily available as an image
through which to affirm male artistic identity, women had to find their own ways of reworking its meanings.
For both artists, the 'maternal nude' was one means by which they could address issues of their own sexual
and creative identity at a time when the roles of artist and mother were viewed as irreconcilable. The figure
of the maternal nude enabled Kollwitz and Modersohn-Becker to develop an iconography which avoided
the conventional voyeurism of the nude and could offer a metaphor for a specifically female model of
creativity. It provided a means of exploring their conflicted desires to inhabit the body of the artist and of
the mother by linking two opposing terms of sexual difference. But the repeated figuration of the mother in
their work also alludes to psychic conflicts involved in making the 'unnameable' female body present in
representation. For Modersohn-Becker, the maternal body as a site of plenitude could only be represented
as existing outside social relationships. In Kollwitz' depictions of motherhood, the recurrent imagery of the
dead child points to the fear of loss of her own identity as an artist. The artistic process could only mirror,
but not resolve, the profound contradiction for women in a period when to be mother meant the loss of an
individual and social self.
Notes
1 This is a substantially revised version of an essay, 'Figuring the Maternal: The Female Nude in the Work of German Women Artists at
the Turn of the Century', which appeared in the catalogue Profession ohne Tradition: 125 Jahres Verein der Berliner Kiimtlerinnen, Berlin,
Berlinische Galerie, 1992. The original version was written in the months immediately before and after the birth of my daughter when I
was experiencing my own identity crisis as a 'maternal figure'.
2 The development of secularized forms of the Madonna and Child in eighteenth - and nineteenth-century art is discussed by Carol
Duncan, 'Happy Mothers and Other New Ideas in Eighteenth Century French Art' in N. Broude and M. Garrard (eds), Feminism and Art
History, New York, Harper & Row, 1982, pp. 201-219, and by Tamar Garb, 'Renoir and the Natural Woman", Oxford An Journal, vol. 8,
no. 2, 1985, pp. 5-15.
3 The combination of the nude or semi-nude female body and the figure of the mother was not entirely new. In the nineteenth century,
a number of artists used the bare-breasted mother suckling her babies to represent the Republic or Charity, political allegories of the
female body which had their roots in classical and Christian iconographic traditions. Marina Warner discusses its symbolic
significance in Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985, pp. 281-6.
4 Both artists studied at the Drawing and Painting School of the Berlin Association of Women Artists, Kollwitz attending in 1885
and 1886 and Modersohn-Becker between 1896 and 1898. Kollwitz returned to the School at the invitation of its director,
Margarete Honerbach, to teach drawing and graphics in 1898. Although she may have overlapped briefly with Modersohn-Becker's
period as a student, no contact between them is recorded. See Betterton 1992: 89—103.
5 Lucy R. Lippard suggests that Kollwitz had little in common with Modersohn-Becker 'except sex and occasional subject matter' (R.
Hinz (ed.) Kathe Kollwitz. Graphics, Posters, Drawings, London, Writers and Readers, 1981, p. vii). See also Alessandra Comini in
'Gender or Genius? The Women Artists of German Expressionism' in Broude and Garrard, Feminism and Art History, pp. 271—91.
6 See Gillian Perry, 'Primitivism and the "Modern"' in C. Harnson, F. Frascina and G. Perry, Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction,
The Early Twentieth C^nrwryNew Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1993, pp. 34—45.
7 This relationship is exemplified in Gustave Courbet's The Painter's Studio, 1855. In Courbets painting, the nude model is replaced
on the canvas by a landscape. Linda Nochlin discusses the gender relationships represented in which 'women and nature are
interchangeable as objects of (male) artistic desire - and domination' (L. Nochlin, 'Courbet's Real Allegory: Rereading "The
Painter's Studio"' in S. Faunce and L. Nochlin, Courbet Reconsidered, New York, Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1988, p. 32).
8 In a recent monograph on Lovis Corinth, Charlotte Berend's pose is described as: 'protected by his arms, but also shielding him, her
gesture is at once suppliant and supportive' (H. Uhr, Lovis Corinth, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1990,
p. 140). Lynda Nead offers a similar description of a painting of husband and wife by George Elgar Hicks, Woman's Mission:
Companion of Manhood, 1863, commenting: 'Norms of femininity and masculinity are constructed in this image' (L. Nead, Myths
of Sexuality, Representations of Women in Victorian Britain, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1988, p. 13).
9 Charlotte Berend has given her own account of the relationship:
When I think back to how I always managed to carry on painting in spite of pregnancy, household duties, cooking, acting as
model, much illness, lookjng after, being careful with money in the early years, in spite of giving strength to Corinth and the
children at all times throughout life, an inner voice would always however call out: 'Don't give up! Be mindful of your energy,
think of yourself!'
(C. Berend-Corinth, 'My life with Lovis Corinth' (1958), extracts in R. Berger,
' Und ich sehe nichts, nichts ah die MalerieAutobiographische Texte van Kiinstlerinnen des 18—20Jahrunderts,
Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989, p. 281, trans. J. Brooks)
A revealing comment in Lovis Corinth's version of their marriage refers to Berend as A guardian angel in human form: that is my
wife', quoted in Charlotte Berend-Corinth: Eine Austellung zum 100 Geburtstag der Kunsterlin Malerie und Graphik, Erlangen,
1980, p. 5 (trans. J. Brooks).
10 An extensive analysis of the gendered identity of the artist and the production of the nude is now available in feminist critical
writing. For recent examples, see L. Nead, The Female Nude, Art, Obscenity and Sexuality, London and New York, Routledge,
1992, and T. Garb, Sisters of the Brush. Women's Artistic Culture in Late Nineteenth Century Paris, Yale University Press, 1994, and
'The Forbidden Gaze: Women Artists and the Male Nude' in K. Adler and M. Pointon (eds), The Body Imaged: The Human Form
and Visual Culture Since the Renaissance, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 33-42. For a useful overview of
women's access to academic art education in the late nineteenth century see J. Diane-Radycki, 'The Life of Lady Art Students:
Changing Art Education at the Turn of the Century', An Journal Spring 1982, pp. 9-13.
11 For an interesting analysis of the construction of the artist's public identity in male self portraiture of the same period, see Irit
RogorT, 'The Anxious Artist — Ideological Mobilisations of the Self in German Modernism' in I. Rogofffed.), The Divided
Heritage. Themes and Problems in German Modernism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
12 Scheffler's comments are quoted in S. Behr, Women Expressionists, London, Phaidon, 1988, p. 8.
13 For a further discussion of attitudes to female creativity amongst German feminists, see Kay Goodman, 'Motherhood and Work
1895-1905' in R.E. JoeresandM.J. Maynes (eds), German Women in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Social and Literary
History, Bloomington, Ind., Indiana University Press, 1986, pp. 110-27.
14 Jane Gallop places this idea in the context of a discussion of the opening and closing passages of Adrienne Rich, Of Woman
Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, New York, Norton, 1976, in which a real-life incident of a mothers decapitation
of her child is described.
15 In the final etched version of the print renamed The Downtrodden, 1900, the self portrait and female nudes were removed and
replaced by a proletarian family group. For a detailed account of the development of the motif, see E. Prelinger, Kathe Kollwitz,
New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1992, pp. 26-30. 16 Fora useful discussion of this idea, see R. Braidotti, 'Body
Images and the Pornography of Representation', Journal of Gentler Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 1991, pp. 148-50.
17 For example, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke left her out of his monograph on Worpswede painters published in 1903 and she
received no professional recognition as a painter before her second public exhibition held in November 1906 at the Bremen
Kunsthalle (P. Modersohn-Becker 1980: 298 and fn. 26).
18 Linda Nochlin has suggested that the image was 'probably created when she was looking forward to motherhood", a view which
collapses the reading of the work, inaccurately as it happens, into biography (A. Sutherland Harris and L. Nochlin, Women Artists
1550-1950, 1978, p. 67).
19 Martha Keans describes a SelfPortrait (\W1) by Kollwitz in which she shows herself pregnant with her first son, Hans, which
suggests some similarities with Modersohn-Becker's work:
she stands nearly full-length before us, her right hand by her side, her left hand lying gently across her breasts; she gazes out
dreamily, preoccupied with a distant image. Unlike her other self portraits, this one conveys a light, drifting mood.
(Kearns 1976: 64)
I have been unable to identify this image.
20 I have used this translation of the passage in preference to that which appears in 'Motherhood according to Giovanni Bellini', in J.
Kristeva, Desire in Language, 1980, p. 238.
21 Shulamith Behr also makes this connection in S. Behr, Women Expressionists, 1988, p. 18. Examples of this type of pregnant
Madonna can be found in the work of Renaissance painters such as Piero della Francesca and Jan Van Eyck.
22 For a fuller discussion of these issues, see F. Gordon, 'Reproductive Rights: The Early Twentieth Century Debate', Gender and
History, vol. 4, no. 3, Autumn 1992. Tamar Garb discusses Renoir's representation of maternity in the context of debates about
motherhood in the French Third Republic in 'Renoir and the Natural Woman', pp. 5—15. Anna Davin examined similar debates
in Britain before the First World War about population, race and motherhood in 'Imperialism and Motherhood', History
Workshop Journal, no. 5, Spring 1978, pp. 9—66.
23 Bachofen's ideas were variously taken up in Engels' The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Frazer's The
Golden Bough (1890), and Freud's Totem and Taboo (1912). His theory of unregulated sexuality in the first stage of matriarchal
society was attacked by Heinrich Schurtz in Alterclassen und Mannerbunde, Berlin, 1902, who argued that monogamous
marriage was characteristic even of the earliest societies, a revealing critique in the context of contemporary debates on the
responsibilities of motherhood within marrige.
24 American feminist Katherine Anthony charactized the women's movement in Britain and the United States as 'Votes for Women'
whereas in Germany and Scandinavia it was Mutterschutz (Protection for Mothers). See Kay Goodman, 'Motherhood and Work
1895-1905' in R.E. Joeres and M.J. Maynes, German Women in the 18th and 19th Centuries: A Social and Literary History, 1986,
pp. 110-27.
25 For a sympathetic discussion of Key's theories, see Cheri Register, 'Motherhood at Center: Ellen Key's Social Vision', Women's
Studies International Forum, vol. 5, no. 6, 1982, pp. 599-610 and Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: the Regulation of
Sexuality since 1800, London, Longman, 1981, pp. 126-8. A more critical view is offered by Sheila Jeffreys, who argues that the
exaltation of motherhood in Key's work and that of her English follower, Havelock Ellis, links neatly with the developing fascist
ideal of woman's destiny in Germany of the 1920s and 1930s (S. Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies, Feminism and Sexuality
1880-1930, London, Pandora Press, 1985, p. 136).
26 The complex relationship between modernist and anti-modernist ideologies and their links to primitivism are very well explored in
Jill Lloyd's essay, 'Emil Nolde's Ethnographic Still Lifes: Primitivism, Tradition and Modernity' in Susan Hiller (ed.) The Myth of
Primitivism, London and New York, Routledge, 1991. See also G. Petty, op. cit.
27 Modersohn-Becker described her deep sense of loss on Clara WesthofFs marriage to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, fearing that
Westhoff s independent identity as a sculptor would be suppressed. This seems to have been intensified by her loneliness in her own
marriage by 1902. On leaving her marriage, Becker also rejected responsibility for her step-daughter, Elspeth, which suggests that
she did not wholly subscribe to maternalist ideology.
28 This brief summary does not exhaust the range of German feminist arguments about women's toie and female sexuality in the
1900s, but it does suggest the strength of maternalist arguments within socialist and feminist positions. Katen Honeycutt ascribes
the lack of radicalism to the predominance of married working-class women within the SPD women's otganizations: 'Socialism and
Feminism in Imperial Germany', Signs, vol. 5, no. 1, 1979, p. 38.
29 H. Stoecker (ed.) Petitionem des Deutschen Bundes fur Mutterschutz, 1905-1916(Redin 1916), reprinted in E.S. Riemer and J.C.
Four (eds), European Women: A Documentary History 1789-1945, Brighton, Harvester Press, 1983, p. 171.
30 The play by Ida Strauss is described in Goodman, op. cit., p. 124. Kollwitz gives her own moving account of the plight of a Frau
Pankopf who suffered violence from her sick and depressive husband and the death of theit child as well as having to support six
remaining children alone, in her diary of September 1909 (K. Kollwitz, The Diaries and Letters ofKathe Kollwitz, Chicago, Henry
Regnery, 1955, pp. 51—2).
31 Elizabeth Prelinger (1992) has noted that Kollwitz' work frequently combines social realism with symbolism, an approach which she
derived from the theories of Max Winger (1857-1920). Klinger was an influential figure in German artistic circles at the turn of
the century. Kollwitz read Klinger's Malerie undZeichnung (1885) as a student, a turning-point in her decision to commit herself
entirely to graphic media. His series of etchings Dramen, 1883, with their highly dramatized social realism influenced Kollwitz'
early attempt at a graphic cycle based on Zola's Germinal, as did his symbolist graphics cycles such as Ein Leben (1884).
Modersohn-Becker also mentions reading a Knackfuss monograph on Klinger while she was in Paris in 1900 (Letters and Journals,
p. 120).
32 Luce Irigaray explores the relationship between the significance of the gaze in western tradition and logocentric forms of
knowledge, arguing for the desplacement of the visual by the tactile. She questions the primacy attached to vision in Lacan's
account of subjective formation and suggests replacing his image of the flat 'mirror' with the curved surface of the 'speculum' to
accommodate women's subjectivity. 'Woman finds pleasure more in touch than in sight and her entrance into a dominant scopic
economy signifies, once again, her relegation to passivity' (L. Irigaray, 'This Sex Which Is Not One' in E. Marks and I. de
Courtrivon (eds), New French Feminisms, Brighton, Harvester Press, 1981: p. 101).
33 For an accessible discussion of these ideas see J. Kristeva, 'A Question of Subjectivity: Interview with Susan Sellars', Women's
Review, no. 12, October 1981, p. 20.
34 A. Miller, The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness (trans. H. and G. Hannum), London,
Virago, 1990, pp. 19—35. My thanks to Andrea Duncan for pointing out this reference to me.
35 Kollwitz describes her drawing for the image thus: 'When he was seven years old and I was doing the etching Mother with Dead
Child, I drew myself in the mirror while holding him in my arm. The pose was quite a strain and I let out a groan (Kollwitz 1955:
164).
36 Although Mary is usually shown holding the adult Christ, some versions of the Pieta, for example by Giovanni Bellini, show Christ
as a child in a pose which prefigures his death, a conception which Kollwirz' image echoes.
37 For a discussion of the mother figure as monster in Alien, see Barbara Creed, 'Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An
Imaginary Abjection', Screen, vol. 27, January/February 1986, pp. 44-60, reprinted in B. Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film,
Feminism, Psychoanalysis, London, Routledge, 1993, and Lynda K. Bundzen, 'Monstrous Mothers: Medusa, Grendel and now
Alien', Film Quarterly, Spring 1987, pp. 11-17.
38 Angela Moorjani suggests that 'A Kleinian reading of Kollwitz's image, on the other hand, suggests the resurfacing of the
phantasmatic oral mother devouring her child' (A. Moorjani, The Aesthetics of Loss and Lessness, Basingstoke and London,
Macmillan, 1992, p. 111).
39 For example, Gwen John's sexually explicit correspondence with August Rodin and Edith Wharton's Love Diary, 1908. I am
grateful to Mara Witzling and Judy Simons for calling my attention to these writings in a session of the Woman, Image, Text
conference, Sheffield Hallam University, 13 November 1993.
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